2015 Hugo nominees - initial reaction post

[psocoptera]

2015 Hugo award ballot.
File 770 breakdown of nominees by Sad and Rabid Puppy lists.

Okay, so, look: I don't think I can talk about 61 out of 85 nominees coming from these organized campaigns without breaking down quickly into "flames on the side of my face" incoherency.

Here's what I can say. I read the vast majority of the new short fiction published online by Strange Horizons, Lightspeed, Clarkesworld, Giganotosaurus, Tor.com, Daily SF, Apex, Subterranean, Crossed Genres, and Beneath Ceaseless Skies last year.

On this year's ballot, there are four novella nominees from Castalia House and one from Analog (incorrectly listed as being from Tor.com, I hope a correction for that circulates soon). There are three novelette nominees from Analog, one from Castalia, and one from Orson Scott Card's Intergalactic Medicine Show, a magazine I don't follow. The short stories come from Castalia, Sci Phi Journal, Galaxy's Edge, and an anthology series of apocalypse stories.

I admit that I don't read Analog and had never heard of Castalia or any of those other magazines. So maybe there's some good stuff out there, I think you know you'll be hearing all about it when the packet comes out.

But JESUS FUCKING CHRIST, it is my STRONG SUSPICION that there are a bunch of Hugo nominators who don't read Strange Horizons, Lightspeed, Clarkesworld, Giganotosaurus, Tor.com, Daily SF, Apex, Subterranean, Crossed Genres, or Beneath Ceaseless Skies, because I read some REALLY FUCKING GOOD STORIES and it pisses me off that not a single piece of short fiction from any of those fine publications made it to this ballot. I mean, never mind that no short fiction I personally LIKED made it to the ballot - NO SHORT FICTION I READ.

I am interested in the Hugos as a conversation about SFF. But this isn't a fucking conversation.

Comments

[irilyth]

> it is my STRONG SUSPICION that there are a bunch of Hugo nominators who don't read [* various good things *]

Based on the whole slate-voting thing, I assume most of them don't read most of the stories in Castalia House or Analog either. You don't have to read anything to donate your fifty bucks towards the worthy cause of oppressed white men.

[psocoptera.livejournal.com]

::makes angry Donald Duck noises at you::

[belecrivain.livejournal.com]

Ugh, yeah, I thought of you and all your hard work the instant I read about the slates.

[psocoptera.livejournal.com]

MY hard work, what about the fucking *editors* of these magazines. What about the *authors* who, in August, we'll find out came in 6-10th in the nominations and should have been on the fucking ballot. Sorry, I'm not yelling at you, and yes I in fact feel sorry for myself too, but I just feel like there is this whole community of people working hard for us to have this interesting SFF writing ecosystem and I am a tiny krill at the very very edge of that and meanwhile a bunch of absolute losers have decided to come dump their toxic waste here because they hate the very idea of a beautiful coral reef. And I guess... it was just the Hugos. No one is actually stopping magazines from publishing and authors from writing. But we had this neat way to recognize and celebrate that, and now... we don't.

[glynhogen.livejournal.com]

I suspect that someone is already organizing a Happy Kitties party (and associated PR efforts) that will be a much more congenial place than the Hugo Losers' party.

[sildra.livejournal.com]

I would have thought Tor.com would be one of the major ones, considering it's affiliated with the actual major fantasy publisher of the same name.

[psocoptera.livejournal.com]

I definitely consider Tor.com a major magazine?

[ursula]

A good friend of mine from high school is on the Sad Puppies slate (hers is the post-apocalyptic anthology short story).

I haven't actually read it, because I generally dislike post-apocalyptic stories, and couldn't hack buying an entire anthology of them. But I'm sad that my friend has a Hugo nomination (!) and I can't just be whole-heartedly excited about it.

[gannet.livejournal.com]

And it turns out that the reason we've never heard of Castalia is that it's owned by Vox Day (http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2015/04/the-biggest-little-sf-publishe.html), which explains why so many things published by them ended up on the Rabid Puppies slate.

[ali-wildgoose.livejournal.com]

I honestly can't see how the Hugos are going to recover from this, without changing their rules so fundamentally as to alter the basic nature of the awards.

It's a sad and frustrating situation. And it's particularly awful that the short fiction categories were the worst affected, as the Hugos are one of the few venues where that sort of story gets and kind of mainstream attention.

Ugh. :(